These notes will outline:

  • how to plot maps
  • how to add labels to maps
  • how to add data to maps

There have been several different iterations of how to create maps over the years. We will be using sf and geom_sf. sf stands for simple feature. The sf packages is a set of tools for working with geospacital vectors (points, lines, polygons, etc). We won’t be talking about the specifics of these too much but if you are into GIS and want to learn more about how these objects are constructed this blog post might help: https://www.jessesadler.com/post/simple-feature-objects/

library(tidyverse)
#you will need to run install.packages("package name") if this is the first time you have used these packages
library(sf)
library(maps)

North Carolina

For our first example, we will be working with a dataset of North Carolina that is built in to the sf package.

#to pull in the North Caroline Dataset
demo(nc, ask = FALSE, echo = FALSE)

You should notice that the nc dataset is now saved in your R environment. This dataset contains information about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) for North Carolina counties, over two time periods (1974-78 and 1979-84). Let’s take a look at that dataset.

Each row represents a county in North Carolina. This data frame contains the following columns:

  • AREA County polygon areas in degree units
  • PERIMETER County polygon perimeters in degree units
  • CNTY_ Internal county ID
  • NAME County names
  • FIPS County ID
  • FIPSNO County ID
  • CRESS_ID Cressie papers ID
  • BIR74 births, 1974-78
  • SID74 SID deaths, 1974-78
  • NWBIR74 non-white births, 1974-78
  • BIR79 births, 1979-84
  • SID79 SID deaths, 1979-84
  • NWBIR79 non-white births, 1979-84
  • geom information needed to plot the map for each county

Let’s begin by simply plotting the map.

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = nc)

Let’s pretty it up.

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = nc, col="black", fill="darkgrey") + 
  theme_light() +
  ggtitle("North Carolina Counties")

#Remember the other theme options: theme_grey(), theme_bw(), theme_dark(), theme_minimal(), theme_classic(), theme_void()

Suppose we want to shade each of these counties, based on the number of births in 1974.

ggplot() +
  geom_sf(data = nc, aes(fill = BIR74), col = "black") +
  theme_light()+
  ggtitle("North Carolina, Birth Rates in 1974")

Here are some options to customize the plot that you might be interested in.

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data=nc) + 
  aes(fill = BIR74) +
  geom_sf_text(data = nc[nc$BIR74 > 15000,], aes(label = NAME), fontface="bold") + # add name labels
  scale_fill_gradientn(colors = c('red','yellow')) + #customize colors
  theme_light() +
  ggtitle("3 Counties in North Carolina, Birth Rates in 1974")
## Warning in st_point_on_surface.sfc(sf::st_zm(x)): st_point_on_surface may
## not give correct results for longitude/latitude data

Color Brewer

There are different color palettes available in the RColorBrewer package.

library(RColorBrewer)
display.brewer.all()

A note about customizing colors:

  • you should use a color scheme that is sequential (has order to it), when you are displaying continuous data
  • you should use a color scheme that is categorical, when your data is in categories and isn’t ordered
  • you should use a color scheme that is diverging, when want to put emphasis on two extremes and mid-range. For example, you might use a diverging palette from red to blue for political party affiliation in the US.
  • pay attention to your map being color blind friendly (RdYlGr is the worst…)
  • as a general rule, try not to use blue to represent a land mass (let’s reserve that for bodies of water)
display.brewer.all(type="all", colorblindFriendly=TRUE)

You can break up sequential or diverging palettes into a fixed number of colors using brewer.pal.

brewer.pal(11, "Spectral")
##  [1] "#9E0142" "#D53E4F" "#F46D43" "#FDAE61" "#FEE08B" "#FFFFBF" "#E6F598"
##  [8] "#ABDDA4" "#66C2A5" "#3288BD" "#5E4FA2"
display.brewer.pal(11, "Spectral")

display.brewer.pal(8, "Spectral")

display.brewer.pal(4, "Spectral")

For example,

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data=nc) + 
  aes(fill = BIR74) +
  ggtitle("North Carolina, Birth Rates in 1974") +
  scale_fill_gradientn(colors = brewer.pal(8, "Spectral") ) +  #customize colors
  theme_light()

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data=nc) + 
  aes(fill = BIR74) +
    ggtitle("North Carolina, Birth Rates in 1974") +
  scale_fill_gradientn(colors = brewer.pal(11, "Spectral")[5:11] )  #customize colors

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data=nc) + 
  aes(fill = BIR74) +
  ggtitle("North Carolina, Birth Rates in 1974") +
  scale_fill_gradientn(colors = c("yellow", "orange", "red") ) #customize colors

Using rnaturalearth

Rnaturalearth contains information to map all the countries in the world (among other things). To get out this country data we use ne_countries. We can also use ne_states to get state data. To plot the map using this package, we will use geom_sf.

library(rnaturalearth)
library(rnaturalearthdata)

To download the world data from the rnaturalearth package.

#don't worry too much about where each of the arguements come from (unless you want to)
world <- ne_countries(scale = 'medium', type = 'map_units',returnclass = 'sf')

A plot of the world…

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = world) + 
  theme_light() +
  ggtitle("World Map, using rnaturalearth")

Countries and Continents

You can subset the data by continent or by country.

Canada

canada <- world %>% 
  filter(name == 'Canada')

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = canada) + 
  ggtitle("Canada") +
  theme_light()

A note about projections:

There are lots of different ways to ``flatten" the earth (projections).

coord_sf will help us change the coordinate system, which includes both projection and extent of the map:

  • By default, maps uses WGS84 as the coordinate reference system (longitude/latitude). Using the argument crs, it is possible to override this setting. (more later)
  • xlim and ylim allow us to crop the map to any area of the world we like. Note that xlim is the latitude and ylim is the longitude.
ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = canada) + 
  coord_sf(crs=st_crs(3347)) ## change to Lambert Projection

  ggtitle("Canada") +
  theme_light() 
## NULL

Europe

europe <- world %>% 
  filter(continent == 'Europe')

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = europe) + 
  ggtitle("Europe") +
  theme_light()

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = europe) + 
  theme_light() +
  ggtitle("Europe, Cropped") +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-30,60), ylim = c(35,70))

USA

usa <- world %>% 
  filter(name == 'United States')

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = usa) + 
  ggtitle("USA") +
  theme_light() 

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = usa) + 
  theme_light() +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-130, -65), ylim = c(20, 50)) +
  ggtitle("Continental USA")

Adding Points

library(nycflights13)

Note that this library contains a dataset called airports which lists all the airports and their latitudes and longitudes.

head(airports)
## # A tibble: 6 x 8
##   faa   name                       lat   lon   alt    tz dst   tzone       
##   <chr> <chr>                    <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <chr>       
## 1 04G   Lansdowne Airport         41.1 -80.6  1044    -5 A     America/New…
## 2 06A   Moton Field Municipal A…  32.5 -85.7   264    -6 A     America/Chi…
## 3 06C   Schaumburg Regional       42.0 -88.1   801    -6 A     America/Chi…
## 4 06N   Randall Airport           41.4 -74.4   523    -5 A     America/New…
## 5 09J   Jekyll Island Airport     31.1 -81.4    11    -5 A     America/New…
## 6 0A9   Elizabethton Municipal …  36.4 -82.2  1593    -5 A     America/New…

Let’s try plotting each of the airports on the map.

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = usa) + 
  theme_light() + 
  geom_point(data = airports, aes(x = lon, y = lat), pch = 19, size=0.5) +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-130, -65),
           ylim = c(20, 50))

Let’s try color coding them by the time zone they are in.

ggplot() + 
  geom_sf(data = usa) + 
  theme_light() + 
  geom_point(data = airports, aes(x = lon, y = lat, col=tzone), pch = 19, size=0.5) +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-130, -65),
           ylim = c(20, 50))

Using maps

The maps package contains several built in maps: world (for all countries in the world), france, italy, nz, usa, state (usa state boundaries), and county (usa counties).

To reference each map you use map_data("mapname"). Rather than use geom_sf map data in this format needs to be mapped using geom_polygon.

world_map <- map_data("world")

ggplot(world_map, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(aes(group=group),fill="lightgrey", col="black") + 
  theme_light()

You can subset the data from particular country/counties.

USA

Load the data:

usa <- map_data("world", region = "usa")

Plot the data:

ggplot(usa, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(aes(group=group), fill="darkgrey",col="black") + 
  coord_fixed(ratio = 1) +
  theme_light() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-130, -65), ylim = c(20, 50)) 
## Coordinate system already present. Adding new coordinate system, which will replace the existing one.

Note the aes(group=group) option. This is SUPER IMPORTANT, so R knows which things to connect together. Otherwise, the graph would look like this:

ggplot(usa, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(fill="darkgrey",col="black") + 
  coord_fixed(ratio = 1) + #maintain aspect ratio
  theme_light() + 
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-130, -65), ylim = c(20, 50)) 
## Coordinate system already present. Adding new coordinate system, which will replace the existing one.

Also when using maps the coord_fixed(ratio = 1) is also super important so the aspect ratio is maintained (a country may appear super stretched or squished). This isn’t too bad for the USA, but for a longer skinnier country like Italy this can get pretty wonky.

italy <- map_data("world", region = "Italy")
# ASPECT RATIO NOT MAINTAINED
ggplot(italy, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(aes(group=group), fill="darkgrey",col="black") + 
  theme_light() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  ggtitle("Italy - Aspect Ratio Not Maintained (not good)")

# ASPECT RATIO MAINTAINED
ggplot(italy, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(aes(group=group), fill="darkgrey",col="black") + 
  coord_fixed(ratio = 1) +
  theme_light() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  ggtitle("Italy - Aspect Ratio Maintained (better)")

EU

Create a dataset with most European countries:

some.eu.countries <- c(
  "Portugal", "Spain", "France", "Switzerland", "Germany",
  "Austria", "Belgium", "UK", "Netherlands",
  "Denmark", "Poland", "Italy", 
  "Croatia", "Slovenia", "Hungary", "Slovakia",
  "Czech republic"
)

europe <- map_data("world", region = some.eu.countries)
ggplot(europe, aes(long, lat)) + 
  geom_polygon(aes( group=group, fill=region), col="black") + 
  coord_fixed(ratio = 1) +
  theme_light() + 
  theme(legend.position = "none")

USA - Adding Data from another dataset

# Prepare the USArrests data
arrests <- USArrests 
arrests$region <- tolower(rownames(USArrests))
head(arrests)
##            Murder Assault UrbanPop Rape     region
## Alabama      13.2     236       58 21.2    alabama
## Alaska       10.0     263       48 44.5     alaska
## Arizona       8.1     294       80 31.0    arizona
## Arkansas      8.8     190       50 19.5   arkansas
## California    9.0     276       91 40.6 california
## Colorado      7.9     204       78 38.7   colorado
# Retrieve the states map data and merge with crime data
states_map <- map_data("state")
arrests_map <- left_join(states_map, arrests, by = "region") #we will talk alot more about joins in one of the coming modules
head(arrests_map)
##        long      lat group order  region subregion Murder Assault UrbanPop
## 1 -87.46201 30.38968     1     1 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
## 2 -87.48493 30.37249     1     2 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
## 3 -87.52503 30.37249     1     3 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
## 4 -87.53076 30.33239     1     4 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
## 5 -87.57087 30.32665     1     5 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
## 6 -87.58806 30.32665     1     6 alabama      <NA>   13.2     236       58
##   Rape
## 1 21.2
## 2 21.2
## 3 21.2
## 4 21.2
## 5 21.2
## 6 21.2
# Create the map
ggplot(arrests_map, aes(long, lat, group = group)) +
  geom_polygon(aes(fill = Murder), color = "black") +
  coord_fixed(ratio = 1)+
  theme_light() + 
  ggtitle("USA, Murders By State")

More

There are all kinds of packages for working with maps in different ways that we didn’t discuss. There are all kinds of things you can do with maps that we haven’t discussed - plotting roads, water (lakes, rivers…), railways, etc.

You may want to check out: